


Survivor's Guilt

by Tarlan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angsty Schmoop, Community: mcsheplets, Community: trope_bingo, M/M, Matchmaking, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 04:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8188829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/pseuds/Tarlan
Summary: Fifty years ago, Rodney McKay made a mistake and John Sheppard paid the price with his life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for **McSheplets** 231: age  
>  and **Trope Bingo** Round 7: matchmaker
> 
> A long, long time ago on a YAHOO comm, someone asked for: _The 'If I Knew Then What I Know Now' Challenge - Fifty years ago, Rodney McKay made a mistake and John Sheppard paid the price with his life. Now, at the brink of death (and alone), Chaya gives Rodney a second chance to make things right, by sending his elder consciousness into his younger body._

Rodney never expected to live to a ripe old age and he had felt the weight of every single day since the disaster, wishing he could take the coward's way out and put himself out of his own misery. He had lost everything that day - Atlantis, his closest friends... John. The inquiry had cleared him of negligence but his mistake during the heat of battle with a Hive mothership had left the Atlantis shield down, allowing hundreds of Wraith to beam into the city.

The Lanteans had fallen back to the gate room, using the last of the ZPM's energy to connect a wormhole to the SGC on Earth, and Rodney could recall those last frantic minutes with crystal clarity as the self-destruct timer counted down. He recalled John was right beside him one moment, laying down covering fire as the lucky few survivors ran through the gate, and in the next he was at the bottom of the stairs trying to save someone.

"Go!" he had yelled. "I'm right behind you."

Rodney had looked back from the event horizon, eyes widening in horror as John was caught by a stun blast, but even before his paralyzed body could hit the floor he was grabbed and Rodney screamed in denial as a Wraith feeding hand slammed into John's chest as his TAC vest was torn aside. His best friend shriveled to a husk before his eyes and Rodney made to run back but a fleeing soldier slammed into him, throwing them both back through the gate, his head bouncing off the metal ramp as he tumbled to the gate room floor inside Cheyenne Mountain in a tangle of limbs. The iris closed and Rodney had no idea if the thumps that followed were unfortunate colleagues and soldiers who hadn't been fast enough - or Wraith trying to get a foothold on Earth.

The silence that followed was deafening, filled by the screaming inside his own head.

"Gone... It's all gone," he heard someone say.

Behind him someone began to wail in grief but his mind was spinning out of control, too shocked to think past the horror.

He held himself together by a thread of sanity in the weeks that followed, unwilling to attend any of the hundreds of funerals, even those of his closest friends and colleagues because he was so close to breaking. Carson was gone, and Jennifer, Teyla, Ronon, Lorne, Radek, Woolsey. He'd seen Ronon's husk in the frantic run for the gate room, barely recognizable, so thin and small compared to the giant of a man he remembered. He'd heard the screams of terror as the Wraith found those desperately trying to hide; saw Radek's last stand in the main laboratory through the surveillance cameras, trying to protect Miko and a few others.

The _Daedalus_ had arrived just too late. It's long-range sensors had seen the destruction of the city, taking the hive mothership and most of its fleet of small cruisers and darts with it. Just to be certain, Caldwell had attacked and destroyed what remained in case anyone had been taken hostage who could reveal Earth's location.

Fifty years had passed and the memory was still as clear today as it had been back then, missing John every single day, but for the first time in fifty years he was smiling because this was the last day. He was dying, alone in his cabin high in the Rockies, miles from anywhere, bought with the money he'd earned while on Atlantis once the hearing ended. They had exonerated him legally but Rodney still blamed himself, spending these past fifty years in isolation going back over every minute detail, every decision, every press of a key, refusing to see or speak to anyone until he was all but forgotten.

He shivered beneath the thick blanket.

He was cold because the fire was dying too and he had no energy left to fetch more kindling, but he welcomed it, letting his last thoughts dwell on the man who had been his best friend through those years on Atlantis. A man who should have been so much more to him than that, if Rodney hadn't been such a coward, hiding behind his 'beards' - Katie, Sam... Jennifer. Yet John had been just as much of a coward, and if Rodney had known then what he knew now they could have been together.

With a trembling hand he pressed the play button and watched as John's image came onto the small screen, torturing him every day since the video was released to him. John looked so incredibly young even though he'd turned forty-two only days before the date of the recording.

"Rodney, if you're seeing this then I'm dead... or missing presumed dead."

Rodney watched him lick his lips nervously, watched him glance off-screen for a moment. Talking of personal issues had never come easy to him.

"I lied. You were always more than a friend to me." He winced but Rodney understood the cryptic remark, recalling John's declaration of love when Rodney had to ascend or die, and his awkward clarification. "Rodney... I... I'm sorry I never..." He straightened up, drawing a deep breath as if about to go into battle, though for John speaking of emotions was courageous even in a 'last testament/living will'. "Rodney, I love you. I always loved you, and I'm... I'm sorry I never had the courage to say it when I was... not dead."

"I love you too," Rodney whispered weakly as one finger, gnarled with age, traced over the handsome face on the screen, over soft lips that he never had a chance to kiss.

Rodney closed his eyes and finally let go, only to open them moments later as a glow began to brighten the room in a beautiful and brilliant white, dazzling him before it coalesced into a familiar figure from decades earlier.

"Chaya," Rodney murmured, too old and too wise to harbor any lingering resentment for the ascended Ancient. "I guess I ascended before so-."

"Yes. That choice remains but I have a debt to repay. To you, and to John." She smiled. "I'm offering you a second chance, Rodney, to pick one moment in time where you can choose to take a different path in full knowledge of what previously came to pass. Once that moment has passed, all that comes after will be as it never was. All memory of this time will disappear, but you must choose quickly, before the others intervene."

After fifty years going back over the events of those final days on Atlantis, Rodney knew the pivotal moment that set those final terrible events into motion and he saw Chaya smile when she saw that moment in his mind.

"So be it."

The interior of the cabin disappeared along with Chaya, replaced by the never-forgotten architecture inside the ZPM room. His finger, no longer old and fragile but firm and agile hovered over the Ancient symbol that would eject the ZPM from its cradle. With everything he now knew flooding through the mind of his younger self, he pulled his hand back as if it had been burned. This was the mistake he had made in the heat of battle - ejecting the second, almost depleted ZPM to replace it with another that was partially-charged, unaware of the frayed crystal wiring that would fail to engage the replacement and cause the shield to fail.

Memories of a terrible, lonely future began to fade quickly just as Chaya warned, and in one last act of desperation to hold onto one single memory he wrote on his hand, 'Hack JS'.

Rodney dropped to his knees and yanked off the panel as the last memory from that other life vanished, momentarily confused as he gazed into the innards, wondering why he was down on his knees rather than switching out the ZPMs. Shaking his head he trusted in his instincts and spotted the fraying connections moments later, making fast repairs before swapping over the ZPM just as it reached entropy. The shield strengthened and more power flooded to the new quantum wormhole drive... and they jumped.

Rodney sank down with his back against the console as he heard cheers over the radio. They had done it. They had left the Wraith thousands of light years behind, far beyond the Wraith's long range scanners.

"You did it, Rodney!" John crowed. "I'm taking her down," he added, and Rodney held tight as Atlantis descended through the atmosphere to softly kiss the surface of an ocean on a new world far from the one they'd had to flee a day earlier.

With luck they'd have plenty of time to make repairs and trickle charge the depleted ZPM using the more stable method that he, Jeannie, and Radek had figured out following the debacle of their first attempt.

Woolsey's voice came over the city-wide comm.

"I want to thank each and every one of you for your dedication to duty over these past days. We are safe once more because of you. And now I want everyone to stand down for twenty four hours minimum. Skeleton crews and essential repairs only." There was a brief pause. "And that includes senior staff, Doctor McKay."

For once Rodney didn't have the strength left to argue. He was exhausted beyond belief even though this siege had been no worse than the previous times they'd been under attack. The door to the ZPM room opened and he smiled crookedly when he saw John grinning back at him, almost vibrating with adrenaline fueled energy.

"Well, don't just stand there grinning like a deranged monkey. Help me up," Rodney grumbled, reaching up and allowing John to pull him to his feet.

He stumbled into John, feeling strong hands grasping and steadying him before almost reluctantly letting go, much to Rodney's regret too. Rodney waved a hand airily.

"Little dizzy. Stood up too fast."

"Come on. Food then bed," John ordered, and Rodney felt a fresh twinge of regret for having less than innocent thoughts regarding his best friend's words but he brushed that aside too.

"Lead on," he stated and followed John.

An hour later Rodney was alone in his quarters, trying to decide between a shower or his amazing bath tub before realizing he was so tired he'd probably drown in the tub. He stripped off quickly, pausing when he saw the writing on his left arm.

"Hack JS?"

It was his handwriting of that he was certain, but he couldn't recall writing it.

"I must have had a good reason," he mused because he'd never consider hacking anything of John's before, especially as he was privy to everything except for John's private files.

John didn't keep an online journal and Rodney recalled Ford mention John had not sent a personal video after the siege in the first year, but when he gave into the temptation to take a look he found a video file dated two weeks earlier. It was dated just days after John's forty-second birthday and the incident where they had both almost died when an off-world mission went south... again. After a moment's hesitation Rodney took a copy and his finger hovered over the play button, torn between respect for John's privacy and his own curiosity; curiosity won out.

"Rodney, if you're seeing this then I'm dead... or missing presumed dead."

He hit the pause and almost deleted the file because this was deeply personal, and yet once more curiosity won out and he pressed play. As the words tumbled awkwardly, Rodney froze in shock. All this time he'd convinced himself John was straight despite the hair, and the leaning, and the glances he thought he caught from time to time but dismissed as wishful thinking. All this time he'd hidden his own love for John out of fear of losing his best friend, even prepared to marry Katie or Jennifer because he was convinced he would never have the person he truly desired. Reining in the desire to rush out of his quarters and go find John immediately, Rodney knew he needed to sleep before making any rash decisions, aware his future hinged on the outcome.

Eighteen hours later Rodney invited John to meet him on the pier in their favorite spot.

He arrived early, putting down a blanket and the decent beer he had snagged from his personal stash, and waited for John, feeling the warmth along one side as John settled next to him, legs swinging over the edge like a big kid. Rodney handed over a beer that was quickly opened, watching as John took a couple of swallows. As always they sat in near silence at first, looking up at the new stars above them before trying to outdo each other with new constellations.

"That's the Hail Mary," John pointed, finger tracing several stars in an shape of a football.

"Huh! And you told me I wasn't allowed to name anything... ever."

The silence stretched but John must have sensed it wasn't the usual comfortable silence between them.

"Rodney?"

"I... learned something, and I need you to promise to hear me out. No talking, no running away until I've finished."

John tensed beside him. "So it _was_ you who hacked my file," he stated coldly.

Rodney was thrown off-kilter with his mentally prepared speech deserting him. John made to leave and in a panic Rodney grabbed hold of his arm.

"I love you too," he blurted out. "I always have and I always will. I'd change whole time lines for you," he added softly as he reminded John of what he had done, apparently, when John was thrown thousands of years into the future.

John sank back down beside him, snagging another beer and drinking it in silence, and for once Rodney curbed his urge to babble and waited. John put his beer aside and turned, removing the beer from Rodney's hand too before cupping his face, leaning in, and kissing him softly with just a hint of desperation.

"Okey-dokey," he said when he drew back, picking up his beer and taking a last swallow, leaving Rodney confused, baffled, and incredibly turned on.

"Eh! Are we good?"

"Oh, I'm hoping we'll be better than good," John replied, and hours later, as they lay wrapped around each other warm and sated, Rodney knew they'd both gained far more than they'd ever hoped or dreamed.

****

On another plane, Chaya looked down at the beautiful city that had once been her home before she fell in love with the people on Proculus and broke her vows as an Ascended being in order to protect them. Thousands of years of exile later, in her loneliness she had interfered with the bonding of two souls. She moved through the city and hovered over them now, watching them sleep safe and content in each other's arms, and quietly pleased to know she had finally repaid her debt to both of them.

"You should not have interfered by sending him back."

"I should not have interfered when they first came to Proculus."

"Two wrongs do not make a right, Chaya Sar."

Chaya smiled and looked at her fellow ascended being, recalling when they were children playing together so many thousands of years ago.

"Are you so certain, Ganos?"

Ganos sighed as she looked down on two who would one day ascend together. "Perhaps there are exceptions," she admitted as they left the city and its new lovers behind.

END  
 


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